Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates

Anyone who still needs to run Windows 10 for whatever reason should switch over to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 (version 21H2) which will continue to receive security updates up through 2032.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...

What even is Microsoft's strategy? Windows 11 requiring TPM, Secure Boot and being all react wasn't great. Now we have a hardware shortage and ai in everything. I miss the time when it was "My computer" and not "This PC". I just hope they keep Windows 10 around till 2030 and longer...

Do the start menu ads pay for this? It is conceivable that they could.

I was a ubuntu user and work forced me to use a windows machine. Over the years I've accumulated so much software that I have no intention of leaving behind (photoshop cs2). In the past year though, I've been transitioning back to Ubuntu. So many software now offer Linux support, there's even less incentives to stay with Microsoft products. And of course is doing everything in it's power to alienate us.

"Quietly" seem to be the most popular headline word this year.

Thanks DoD! While you’re at it let’s keep SCCM around for another 50 years! Woooo!

Needs to be logged in, so not exactly user friendly. But made me happy, I was afraid I might have to do updates again now I can continue life not being bothered by windows update.

Especially with hardware prices at the moment, this is a welcome announcement for many companies right now who need a refresh.

Windows 10 for me until new games won't run on it

They could actually help with the RAM and SSD shortage by extending support for Windows 10.

this will probably go on for a long time, which is great because I won't install win11

Why does Windows 11 still have "Control Panel" and "Settings", both of which are similar but entirely different?

I hate Microsoft, I was very happy with Windows 10 but Windows 11 is different for no reason except to be different.

I wonder if it’s because hardware costs are going up

The old "Windows alternates good and bad releases" rule is dead and buried. Every major version since Windows 7 has been a downgrade on what came before. I'd rather be using Windows 8 than Windows 10 and you will have to drag me kicking and screaming into Windows 11.

You can get a completely minimalist Windows 11 by grabbing an ISO from Microsoft then reprocessing the ISO by feeding it into this utility: https://github.com/christitustech/winutil (Win11 Creator Tab) to get a NEW ISO which you then install. The end result is an extremely clean and stable Windows 11 installation.

  The resulting image can remove telemetry, bypass hardware requirement checks, and enable local account setup out of the box.

Official docs:

https://winutil.christitus.com/

https://winutil.christitus.com/userguide/win11creator/

I have Win10 on a computer on my left side as "backup" system.

I decided I won't change to Win11, so Win10 will be last Windows version to use. It's no issue in that I am using Linux since late ~2004 anyway, but I am also unwilling to cater to Microsoft anylonger. I think it is time that governments no longer force people to use Windows in general. For similar reasons I reject the upcoming mandatory age sniffing that lobbyists are pushing for (together with their attempt to kill off VPNs).

Anyone who still needs to run Windows 10 for whatever reason should switch over to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 (version 21H2) which will continue to receive security updates up through 2032.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...

Well, not just anyone can buy a license for it. You need some sort of enterprise volume license agreement, as far as I can tell.

Linux is free and less wasteful on resources on the other hand.

You can continue using normal Windows 10 if you have a Microsoft account attached to it. They give you the option to sign up for free extended updates (until 2027).

Current trends indicate that regular Windows 10 may as well.

Also MS go to great lengths to make the secret good version of Windows (It honestly is very good, I'd put it up there with Linux Mint) very difficult to buy. So just torrent it. It's bad enough running Windows let alone giving money to MS.

Does that support modern gaming?

Well, not just anyone can buy a license for it. You need some sort of enterprise volume license agreement, as far as I can tell.

Thanks DoD! While you’re at it let’s keep SCCM around for another 50 years! Woooo!

Windows 10 for me until new games won't run on it

Do the start menu ads pay for this? It is conceivable that they could.

this will probably go on for a long time, which is great because I won't install win11

They could actually help with the RAM and SSD shortage by extending support for Windows 10.

Have you tried wineHQ? It works very well IMO. But I also understand your point of view here; I have a second computer system on my left running Win10.

>> Windows 11 requiring TPM, Secure Boot and being all react wasn't great.

For me a bigger concern is that Windows 11 requires MS account, and making harder and harder to bypass it. This is a disrespect for my freedom and privacy. The hardware is not the biggest issue because it might catch up eventually. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...

Requiring a sodding Copilot advert on the keyboard too, in the case of laptops..

I assume they're secretly trying to get people over to Mageia.

The people I've switched from windows to Mageia since win11 all love it.

(As great as Mageia is, it does have small repos compared to Debian or fedora.)

Especially with hardware prices at the moment, this is a welcome announcement for many companies right now who need a refresh.

And sad for us. We may have to wait for nice cheap used hardware for use with Linux or *BSD.

But I wonder if components would have been stripped out due to AI. I heard even older RAM and SDD/HDD are getting expensive.

"Quietly" seem to be the most popular headline word this year.

Win11 has come up short,

So 10 needs more support.

How do they offer it, according to AI?

Quietly,

quietly,

quiet... L-Y!

Biggest LLM giveaway these days

Why does Windows 11 still have "Control Panel" and "Settings", both of which are similar but entirely different?

I hate Microsoft, I was very happy with Windows 10 but Windows 11 is different for no reason except to be different.

Don't forget the Windows NT configuration consoles like MMC, and other 9x configuration dialogs not accessible from the control panel, like the one to show or hide desktop icons.

The reason for this is that there are still drivers for old hardware that hook into the old control panel elements to actually function.

If you get rid of the control panel applets, you break the drivers.

This is also an old and out-of-date complaint. Almost all of the settings are now inside the Settings application and only inside the Settings application, with the related control panel applets gone.

Needs to be logged in, so not exactly user friendly. But made me happy, I was afraid I might have to do updates again now I can continue life not being bothered by windows update.

You can use https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU to bypass the account requirement.

I think you can log in to activate without changing to a microsoft account for desktop login (or at least you can switch back, I have some machines on microsoft account and some not)

I have Win10 on a computer on my left side as "backup" system.

I wonder if it’s because hardware costs are going up

Current trends indicate that regular Windows 10 may as well.

Have you tried wineHQ? It works very well IMO. But I also understand your point of view here; I have a second computer system on my left running Win10.

  The resulting image can remove telemetry, bypass hardware requirement checks, and enable local account setup out of the box.

Official docs:

https://winutil.christitus.com/

https://winutil.christitus.com/userguide/win11creator/

To anyone reading this: please don't use ISOs downloaded from not-official sources.

Use an autounattend.xml, the mass graves, and a WinGet JSON to customise an online image.

[1]: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/package-manager/wi...

NTlite has also been around for more than a decade, although it has a freemium model.

That won't help you get to the minimum of Win10, though

Even cleaner when you don't install Windows at all :P

Why would people put themselves through the painful process of keeping themselves safe from their own computer?

This rule was always wrong and stupid, people skipped versions and never started at the beginning to fit the narrative.

> It honestly is very good, I'd put it up there with Linux Min

I am not necessarily a Microsoft hater per se, but to insinuate that Linux is on the same level as the Microsoft operating system is really strange to me. Whenever I, for instance, have to copy files to windows, I am getting annoyed at how slow it is compared to Linux. And that's just one issue I have. Another one is how slow e. g. ruby is on windows, compared to linux. The windows operating system is simply not good. Linux also has issues, in particular the main GUIs (both qt and gtk suck).

Does that support modern gaming?

There used to be a website something like "windowsserver2008gaming.com" or something like that idr the specific domain, that was literally a guide to turn old windows server OS installs into gaming computers. The golden years.

It does support "modern gaming" yes, but like the sibling comment mentions, at least Riot's anti-cheat demands Windows 10 22H2 (the last iteration of Win10) as a minimum. There are a few somewhat convoluted workarounds floating around that people use. Also Adobe CS seems to require Win10 22H2.

My only caveat is that I’m not sure how it handles multiplayer games that require anti-cheat or DRM-style mechanisms, but it’s been flawless with every title I’ve thrown at it so far (BG3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk, Ori, etc)

Even Riot’s rootkit “Vanguard” has reduced requirements for Windows 10.

"modern gaming" being a euphemism for "more proprietary software that has chained us to even worse proprietary software for decades".

You can continue using normal Windows 10 if you have a Microsoft account attached to it. They give you the option to sign up for free extended updates (until 2027).

...which is exactly what the featured article is about. But 2032 > 2027, so I have to assume the person you replied to already knew that and was providing additional advice.

Linux is free and less wasteful on resources on the other hand.

It is, and if you can switch, it’s highly recommended. I have some pretty bespoke old RS-232 Windows software that was an absolute disaster to get working under Debian with Wine a few years back, so I (and others) might still need to keep a copy of Windows around.

Out of interest, what value do you think that a comment like that has, in a forum such as this? You're not likely to be informing people with information they're not already abundantly aware of.

Whereas the person you're responding to is adding value, for me at least. I am in what might be an edge-case position where I need to run software specific to Windows and, much more importantly run hardware that uses drivers which seemingly don't work on Windows 11 (I only learnt recently, whilst planning to finally 'upgrade').

I couldn't even begin to do what I do, ably and competently at least, in a Linux environment.

And I've had at least one laptop for general use running some flavour of Linux for about 16 years now.

Unless it's some Microsoft version of Linux, of course, in which every keystroke you type performs a docker run ... or whatever.

Requiring a sodding Copilot advert on the keyboard too, in the case of laptops..

I assume they're secretly trying to get people over to Mageia.

The people I've switched from windows to Mageia since win11 all love it.

(As great as Mageia is, it does have small repos compared to Debian or fedora.)

Biggest LLM giveaway these days

Win11 has come up short,

So 10 needs more support.

How do they offer it, according to AI?

Quietly,

quietly,

quiet... L-Y!

Don't forget the Windows NT configuration consoles like MMC, and other 9x configuration dialogs not accessible from the control panel, like the one to show or hide desktop icons.

NTlite has also been around for more than a decade, although it has a freemium model.

This rule was always wrong and stupid, people skipped versions and never started at the beginning to fit the narrative.

>> Windows 11 requiring TPM, Secure Boot and being all react wasn't great.

And in order to get the Windows 10 updates in the article, you need to sign up for an MS account, or pay them $30 a year not to spy on you.

Also the constant turning on despite my prior explicitly disabling of spyware (memory ‘live sampling’ to the cloud for ‘virus protection’, one drive ‘auto backup’), and features I’ve explicitly disabled like copilot.

It’s creepy as fuck, and for no real benefit to me that I can tell.

And sad for us. We may have to wait for nice cheap used hardware for use with Linux or *BSD.

But I wonder if components would have been stripped out due to AI. I heard even older RAM and SDD/HDD are getting expensive.

At least in a desktop context, you can get by with just a separate drive to boot-to.

To anyone reading this: please don't use ISOs downloaded from not-official sources.

Use an autounattend.xml, the mass graves, and a WinGet JSON to customise an online image.

[1]: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/package-manager/wi...

That won't help you get to the minimum of Win10, though

Even cleaner when you don't install Windows at all :P

Why would people put themselves through the painful process of keeping themselves safe from their own computer?

> It honestly is very good, I'd put it up there with Linux Min

You can use https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU to bypass the account requirement.

The reason for this is that there are still drivers for old hardware that hook into the old control panel elements to actually function.

If you get rid of the control panel applets, you break the drivers.

I think you can log in to activate without changing to a microsoft account for desktop login (or at least you can switch back, I have some machines on microsoft account and some not)

Do be aware that an autounattend.xml can cause Windows setup to execute arbitrary code. Their provenance matters too. It's relatively easy to encode scripts (or even binaries) into the XML to run during or after Windows setup. You can eyeball them, for sure, but I bet most people don't.

The tool linked by the parent doesn't download ISOs from non-official sources.

I use uup dump myself, which downloads the components directly from MS and builds the ISO locally

Did you even read what I wrote?

Yes it will, please re-read carefully. winutil removes hardware checks.

Not everyone has the luxury of moving off of Windows. Solidworks, for example, has no Linux or Mac port.

Though I do agree, if your workflow is supported by any non-NT based OS, that's probably a better option

And good god...windows 11 updates still take fucking hours and still require multiple reboots. How this is still so painful after 2 decades is beyond me

And in order to get the Windows 10 updates in the article, you need to sign up for an MS account, or pay them $30 a year not to spy on you.

This is pretty much where I've landed.

Even aside from issues with W10 specifically, I'm so tired of having to download GBs of updates and then figure out which launch params to use to trick $GAME into launching when I find a few spare minutes to play games using Steam.

Contrast that with my Miyoo Mini+ handheld which lets me dip into games immediately whenever I have a few spare minutes (around the house, waiting for an appointment, waiting for kids, etc.). There are _thousands_ of games I've missed over the years and I've pretty much decided that I don't need to (i.e. can't) keep up with AAA releases or new consoles.